1 - Desire is Social

Summary

… oedipalization is one of the most important factors in the reduction of literature to an object of consumption conforming to the established order, and incapable of causing anyone harm.

(Deleuze and Guattari)

Memorial culture appears in many different forms. There is the institutionalized setting of public commemoration, such as the celebratory activities of Memorial Day, or the countless memorials and monuments erected in public places. In addition, there is the whole industry of memorialization, such as memorial exhibitions and museums, as well as Hollywood's rendition of real-life collective traumas in film, not to forget the blossoming industry of memorial tourism to former concentration camp sites like Auschwitz and Birkenau. Further, there are the spontaneous memorials – teddy bears, flowers, wreaths, and letters – such as those flooding the gates of Buckingham Palace in London upon the death of Princess Diana (31 August 1997), or surrounding the perimeter of ground zero in Manhattan after 9/11. More recently, a new phenomenon of cyber memorialization has appeared giving people the opportunity to produce spontaneous memorials online and these commonly take the form of letters and poems. Needless to say, these are all examples of how culture is involved with shaping, organizing, and situating collective memory in space and time. Yet, how the movement of traumatic memory qualitatively changes the social field is not so easily located within the neat parameters of the public memorial or monument.